Once or twice over the years I have peered out of the bathroom during Sister Luz’s gatherings. I have watched three or four of them, aging women in soiled habits, making themselves as small and inevident as physically possible, their bodies scrunched up and pressed to the ground…

The guys in the office laughed when you were assigned this one. You’ll know them by their scabbed knuckles, they said, by their clawed right hands cradled always at chest level like twitching beach-rescued starfish.

We know they must smell like the dustbins behind a seafood restaurant, although we can’t smell them from here. They look as cold and alien to the touch as the part of your leg that finds its way out from under the bedclothes in winter.